At the time I'd not got round to understanding the yaml front matter etc. I even user Zettlr for a while [0].
I then discovered quarto [1] and this changed everything. Much nicer experience. I used this for my masters papers.
I think the tooling around pandoc is what makes it such a good tool. I remember attempting restructured text and latex and having a right hard time.
I keep thinking that modern text editors are just flawed and markdown, with all its downsides and limitations, is what 99% is the people need.
If you want a pure markup language that is simple, plain text readable and able to produce text more complex than what a type writer could manage in 1920 then restructured text is the way to go.
I mean, they don't want to think about building the output, never mind controlling the process.
Unfortunately, most people don't use paragraph styles, but if you do, it's a couple clicks.
My markdown resume has its own problems but having this level of control has been a huge load off my mind.
Oh no, inspiration has arrived. Guess I know what I'm wasting my weekend into, hah.
Also this page seems to have existed for a while and I never heard of it! I'm glad I stumbled upon this. A lot of nice ideas here.
Table layouts were often broken, with text overlapping into adjacent fields. Unicode font fallback didn't work properly, with characters like "→" being silently dropped because they didn't exist in the main font. Having predictable control of page breaks, to avoid situations where header text didn't stick to the following paragraph and instead had header and paragraph text split over a page boundary, was pretty much impossible.
I ended up concluding that Markdown isn't a sufficiently powerful markup language for page-based documents, and went back to using Word in all its WYSIWYG delight.
That said, maybe there were ways of doing all of the above but I couldn't figure it out and found the whole process of wrestling with with both Markdown and LaTeX templates, and Pandoc configuration, unintuitive and annoying.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1664049/can-i-force-a-pa...
I would be lost had I have to use the Office tools to edit and format my text.
So thank you to all the maintainers of Pandoc.
Embarrassingly, a horrible little script for converting Pandoc's Markdown endnotes to inline format remains my most-starred GitHub repo: https://github.com/ltrgoddard/inliner/
If you are using markdown, you already understand the conceptual basis for it, so you just need to understand how it's implemented over there.
I'm not arguing that it is something you should do, just rolling my eyes at "I would be lost".